Javascript: the Beginning
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JavaScript lets you add wonderfully interactive functionality to your web page, giving visitors to your web site a more interesting experience. It's a great language to learn after you've learned HTML. This article, the first in a multi-part tutorial, gets you off to a good start.
In a galaxy far, far away a man-child was given a name that would ensure his geekdom: Brendan Eich (I am sure many girls used to say Brendan EEK!). It was the year 1964 on the distant planet Sunnyvale, California and as Brendan breathed his first breath of life, the doctors were confounded to find that he was born with several crippling disfigurements. On the right side of his chest, above his quivering heart, was an object that looked suspiciously like a pocket protector. And covering his eyes were a pair of gold rimmed glasses loosely held together by tape.
There was nothing the doctors could do. The Eich parents had to face it. Their baby boy would forever be a nerd.
As the years passed, Brendan began to develop all the signs and symptoms of Nerditis. His disease finally reach an apex in April of 1995 when he created his first programming language: Mocha.
The name of Mocha was changed to LiveScript, when it was determined that Mocha was too similar to Java. Then LiveScript was changed to Javascript when it was determined that LiveScript was not similar enough to Java.
Now that we know the history of JavaScript, let's start learning how to program with it.
Before we begin, I am going to make an assumption: you know how to write HTML. I say that because the majority of the scripts you will be writing will be embedded into HTML code. So if you don't know it, go ahead and learn it. It's a pretty simple language, and even if you use drag and drop for all of your web designing, it's still handy if you ever run into any weird issues.
Next: Adding Javascript to an HTML Page >>
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